Brad Johnson is the editor of HillHeat.com, which covers climate policy in our nation's capital. He was previously the campaign manager of Forecast the Facts, a grassroots organization dedicated to accountability on the climate crisis and scientific integrity, and the editor of ThinkProgress Green. Brad holds a bachelor's degree in math and physics from Amherst College and master's degree in geosciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the co-author of Technomanifestos, a history of the Information Revolution. Brad has appeared on national and local television and radio, and is a regular speaker on climate policy and politics.

Brad has also worked as a developer for Saatchi & Saatchi and the Democratic National Committee. Brad grew up in Boston, Massachusetts and now lives in Oakland, Calif.

Entries by Brad Johnson

Coral Davenport, one of The New York Times' few environmental reporters, is repeating her past mistakes on Keystone XL reporting. The Keystone XL pipeline would connect Canada's tar sands to Texan oil refineries, allowing the high-carbon product to reach the global oil market. Over its forty-year intended lifetime, the pipeline's...

Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who argued the losing side of Bush v. Gore, is now defending the coal industry against the Environmental Protection Agency's planned rules for greenhouse pollution from power plants. In a submission to the EPA's comment period for the Clean Power Plan, Tribe...

The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, now under consideration for approval by the U.S. Senate, would have a significant and dangerous impact on the climate, incompatible with the White House goal of a sustainable climate.

In line with scientific warnings, President Barack Obama and the U.S. State Department have...

The tech exodus from the American Legislative Exchange Council continues, with German software giant SAP ending its membership in the anti-climate lobbying group. The blow is especially harsh as ALEC's corporate board was chaired by SAP lobbyist Steve Seale. SAP's departure...

At a March 26 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Republican congressmen took turns attacking President Obama's top science advisor, John Holdren. On climate change, their statements became increasingly heated, accusatory, and bizarre.

The ongoing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) States and Nation Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. Wednesday to Friday is featuring several nationally prominent Republicans with potential aspirations for the U.S. 2016 presidential nomination. The five announced speakers at the annual conference of the lobbying group, which links corporations and...

Several organizations supported by Internet giant Google are calling on Congress to let the wind production tax credit to expire. A full-page advertisement from the Koch brothers' organization Americans for Prosperity states that the "undersigned organizations and the millions...

On Monday, Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business Network exploited the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy to promote the conspiracy theory that climate science is a liberal fiction. Referring to the catastrophic storm, Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney railed against the "global warming agenda" of the "mainstream media."

Varney's guest, the conservative Media Research Center's Dan Gainor, complained that of the 32 segments in network news his group found that mentioned Sandy and global warming, only two questioned the overwhelming science that the increasing greenhouse effect from the combustion of fossil fuels is accelerating sea level rise and making weather more extreme and chaotic.

Despite numerous scientific attribution studies on wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and storms that have found global warming fingerprints, Gainor falsely claimed that "we cannot link climate change or global warming to a specific event." He furthermore dismissed the decades of work by thousands of scientists in all earth-science disciplines that provide our understanding of climate change as "stuff" and "guesswork."

Gainor did not emphasize that his organization found only 32 mentions of climate change and Sandy in an entire year of network news coverage. (In contrast, for example, there were 52 segments on Iran's nuclear program in five months of network news coverage from November 2011 to March 2012.)

Climate denial is rampant in the financial press, not just the media organs owned by Murdoch like Fox and The Wall Street Journal. Forbes regularly publishes climate-denial columns, and Reuters editors are openly hostile to climate science. And Comcast's CNBC features hosts such as Joe Kernen, who argues that the findings of climate science are a plot concocted by a "bonafide cult" of "enviro-socialists" and the "eco-taliban."

Varney and Gainor bemoaned as "media censorship" the public stand the Los Angeles Times has taken against global warming denial in its opinion pages. Over 25,000 people have signed a petition from climate accountability organization Forecast the Facts calling on the nation's other major papers, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, to follow suit.

The anemic response of Wall Street -- the Fox Business Network's primary audience -- to Hurricane Sandy's wake-up call on global warming has sparked debate. On Sunday, Forecast the Facts hosted a forum held in downtown New York City looking at the role of Wall Street in financing the climate change that threatens New York's future prosperity. The panelists of the Turning the Tide forum, including Center for American Progress senior fellow Bracken Hendricks, Tom Steyer adviser Kate Gordon, and New Economy Lab's James Slezak, discussed how the financial industry needs to reject the anti-scientific arguments pushed by Murdoch's media properties and the Koch brothers' network of politicians, think tanks, and advocacy groups.

Gordon cited the Risky Business initative, led by Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. The initiative, Gordon explained, is meant not only to provide an economic assessment of the risk exposure different companies and industries have to man-made global warming, but also to change the culture of the financial sector. With that goal in mind, influential Republicans and conservatives who accept the basic science of climate change have been courted.

Wall Street is at a crossroads, all the panelists agreed. On the path of fossil-fuel companies and climate deniers like New York City's richest man, carbon financier David H. Koch, lies accelerating sea level rise and intensifying storms that will swamp the islands of New York City. But the investors and analysts can choose another path, recognize the science, and invest in a sustainable, resilient future that will save their...

President Barack Obama's speech on climate change may augur a new era of liability for carbon polluters with respect to climate and weather damages. In his address at Georgetown University on Tuesday, the president laid out the logic that ties greenhouse emissions to economic costs being borne today:

Today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented the city's long-term plan to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. "We haven't waited for Washington to lead the climate change charge," Bloomberg said at the Duggal Greenhouse...

The State Department's "don't worry" environmental impact statement for the proposed Keystone XL tarsands pipeline, released late Friday afternoon, was written not by government officials but by a private company in the pay of the pipeline's owner. The "sustainability consultancy" Environmental Resources Management (ERM) was paid an...

The U.S. House of Representatives, after nearly three months of delay, is finally voting to provide emergency federal aid for the survivors of Superstorm Sandy. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) prevented a vote in the previous Congress, leaving millions of Americans in the cold and outraging Northeast Republicans such...